Factors worth Considering while Clod Bursting

In the cloud applications arena, cloud bursting is a highly recommended technique for high performance, as it allows application deployment locally while bursting to the public cloud to meet increased business demands. This approach can free up local storage infrastructure for business-critical applications also offering cost benefits—enterprises only pay for the extra compute resources.

In contrast to this cost benefits, moving data through cloud burst architecture is costly and time consuming. However, enterprises can make use of the different possible technical methods to resolve bottlenecks in the cloud burst landscape.

Switching from hybrid to public cloud

Public cloud providers offer numerous cost benefits as IaaS, demanding only a low and predictable cost of ownership which also includes a shift from capital expenditure approach to an operating expenditure system. Further, adopting collocation-in-cloud setups offers the necessary cloud bursting architectures coupled with fast storage access—creating a truly agile cloud environment. Additionally, the approach includes long-term machine ownership agreements—ensuring security on enterprises’ critical data and information to a large extent. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and many other public cloud providers offer dedicated systems and long term deals within their cloud environments that effectively meet collocation capabilities and compliance requirements.

However the long term commitment also means that IT organizations may get locked up with the collocation vendor for one or two years—a shackle that prevents buyer’s ability to chose for better providers. This may sometimes bring in capital losses unless the partnership offers more customized benefits over the less flexibility challenges.

Coupling with a fast WAN

Enterprises can also collocate their private cloud environment to a telco or a collocation facility that can handle fast WAN operations or links. By doing so, businesses can run their normal workloads on a fast LAN, at the same time maintaining robust connections with big public cloud platforms through fast fiber links—for both cloud bursting and workload rebalancing. This is accepted as a better choice than an in-house cloud in offering cloud burst workflows.

In contrast, this approach calls for an increased dependency on the Telcos. For instance, if they delay the roll out of urban fiber cables, IT enterprises that require immediate cloud bursting need to wait.

In-House cloud bursting architectures

Enterprises can also build efficient cloud bursting architectures in their own datacenters. This includes careful scheduling and rebalancing of workloads according to the data traffic and priorities—rolling everything in-house. Though it offers a lot of benefits, automation has only a small reach in this method making implementation a much complicated and tougher task.

Developing a partition between public and private cloud

A different approach toward cloud bursting is to segregate data into multiple subsets in order to station some of these subsets in the public clouds. This architecture can be applied for transient data and other data that are not pulled out frequently. IT developers should see that the partition wall between the public cloud and the private cloud potions to be dynamic in nature—to support cloud bursting on demand.

Bottom Line

While considering cloud bursting, organizations should be carefully considering security measures and compliance requirements without fail as cloud computing service providers do not necessarily offer a PCI DSS-compliant environment. This can take a huge toll on enterprises subjecting sensitive data to high risk—particularly the retailers.

Although public cloud providers such as AWS vest heavily in data protection, counter-threat measures and tenant isolation, it is always safe to prioritize the data by cloud bursting only the less relevant ones. Further, the incompatibility between different environments and the limited availability of management tools are the other bottlenecks that enterprises need to overcome while adopting cloud bursting.